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Off Balance

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Barefoot on Gravel, Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Jane Shlensky, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry on November 17, 2023| 16 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Jane Shlensky]

Balance

Each morning Granny hobbles to the spring

uphill two miles with buckets in her hands

through woods now thick with frost, limbs cleared of leaves.

And over rocks almost atop a hill

behind her house, she sees the water gush,

and, slow with age, she stoops to clear away

the leaves and sticks that clot the pulses’ rush,

and, cracked cup in her hand, she dips into

“sweet water” as she calls it, gathered wild

as honey in abandoned rees, and pours

the nectar into metal milking pails

to carry down the mountain, arms held far

from hips and sides, all tense – as pugilists

might hold their arms, quite low with hands in fists.

But her fists grip the metal handle’s cut

into her palms, as water weighs her down

and down the well-worn path toward her house.

I offer her a new artesian well,

but she just laughs at me and shakes her head.

I ask if I may carry home the spring

for her, but she denies she wants the help

and says it gives her reason for a walk

among the trees on any given day

and carrying two buckets makes her sure

of foot and balanced in a world that’s not.

Jane Shlensky

❦ ❦ ❦

I hate my anger more than I hate vomiting. The dead sick inevitability as it rises, how it makes my hands go cold and clenches my jaw. Disorienting, paralyzing rational thought. I am not going to let that anger out.

People tell you it’s best if you do. You have to let go of your anger. Maybe they’re right, because while it’s rising I don’t even see it coming, I don’t know to call it anger, I have no warning or defense that might prevent the stupid things I will do or the hurtful things I will say. I am afraid of the anger so I run from it before it can get me. Running, stumbling, I usually fall. Anger blasts me off balance.

Linda and I are sitting in the car. We had thought to take a walk in the gardens but now I’ve picked a fight with her, I can’t even recall about what. Linda has never let me get away with anything – I say this with honest, grudging admiration – and she says something now that jars me: “So is this what it’s going to be, then?” She is seeing something I can’t see. I admit it. I’m so confused, I tell her. And so she pushes me to relive the last couple of hours, ticking over the balance sheet – frustration at last night’s botched meeting, undercurrent of worried anticipation for tomorrow, niggling mis-steps and course changes this morning that had me snapping at a friend, patience evaporating to hot steam. Little angers mounting, not let out.

At last she wants to give me some justification. “Anyone would feel that way.” Not this time. True or not, I’m not buying that line. I’ve used it a hundred times to tamp down the anger, cover it and hide it. I don’t actually gain much insight into all this until much later, but there is one best way to regain some balance. To let anger’s own entropy cool it down to nothing. Sitting in the car next to Linda, I open up and own it. I said and did things that hurt people; I am responsible. I am sorry. I’m not happy with myself or the situation, but at least the two of us are finding enough balance to begin our walk after all.

❦

It hurts to walk barefoot on gravel. When I first met Linda, she and her sisters went barefoot all summer long. It was nothing for them to walk a mile or two on those tar-and-gravel Ohio roads or through the woods over dry twigs and sweetgum balls. I tried to keep up, limping like an old codger and next day lame. But I kept walking on sore feet because I wanted to keep up. I wanted to be near them.

Jane Shlensky’s poems will not make you limp although they can be sharp and pointed. They will make you want to come along and keep up. Jane loves her characters, which she has drawn from generations of rural memories and red clay. She grew up in Yadkin County, NC, just across the muddy river from me, and she sees those farmers and grandmothers and wives more clearly than they ever saw themselves, perhaps. I don’t sense Jane imploring us to return to those old times and old ways. Instead, she shines her light on the truth of what brought her up and made her. What we carry in our pockets may change, but what we carry in our hearts does not. Read Barefoot on Gravel and find a moment of balance in a world that is so often not.

❦ ❦ ❦

Ain’t No Sunshine

“Oh, Lord,” she says, mixing the batter

for pancakes, the sausages sizzling,

the coffee perking in her mama’s pot

that’s so worn it’s barely metal.

She keeps it for the comforting perk,

fragrant life bubbling up, making promises.

But he’s in his wing chair, hunkered

over his guitar, his face blank as rain,

his strum, hum, strum him,

accompanying his slow moan.

His voice is like buttered rum, oiled

and warm as fever, just enough gravel

in his bass notes to scratch at her heart.

“Oh, Lord, that man,” she says to no one,

but her Lord hears everything in her heart.

She knows this as sure as she knows

the spit of oil before she tips the batter in,

as sure as she knows the hiss and blister,

bubble browning in the cakes.

He is having one of his blue days –

won’t fight the sadness, just leans on

that old guitar, curls in on himself

like a dog that hopes to lick the pain away.

He’s finding a sound to help him stand,

a trembling chord to lift a mighty weight.

He’s singing his own song and she knows it,

her heart clutching at his words, wishing

she could mother is sorrow away, feed

his hopes. She needs him, even if

they struggle every day. She turns to Jesus

kneeling on the wall and whispers,

“Dear Lord, that man there . . . we best

but some blueberries in these cakes.”

Jane Shlensky

❦ ❦ ❦

One Better

While we puzzled over the perfect

birthday gift for our father,

he packed up his fishing gear and

a few clothes and bid us farewell.

Jane Shlensky

❦ ❦ ❦

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Small Voices

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, GSMIT, Joy Harjo, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Wendell Berry on November 10, 2023| 8 Comments »

[With poetry by Joy Harjo and Wendell Berry]

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

Joy Harjo

❦ ❦ ❦

[Great Smoky Mountains National Park bids Bill farewell during the last moments of the Tremont Writers’ Conference:]

Goodbye, Love. Thanks for dropping by. This is your last chance to slurp up the prompts you were thinking you might be handed while you’re here. Your last opportunity to be inspired. Which means what, exactly? Inspire, breathe in, be filled with spirit. But did you think I’d tip you up like a funnel and just pour right down? Think back to that little exercise in your application and cull one word – community. This is something I know all about, I the Queen of Connections, I the web of interactions, whether in a gram of soil beneath your feet or spanning the entire watershed of this Middle Prong that flows past you right now – community.

I’m more than willing to speak. I live to show myself to you. Take a closer look at my image in that postcard and read the fine print: International Biosphere Reserve. But did you notice how small those letters are compared to the beech and oak overtowering? The subtext is, you don’t have to be such a geek about it. Oh sure, learn my names, my histories, my ecologies, but please, for at least one moment, forget about words on paper, Human Person, and just look around you.

Right around you – seven faces peering back (eight, if you count Jeremy arriving with the coffee delivery). What have you found here, and what will you keep? It’s more than friendship, it’s more than a shared task and a common goal. It’s connection. Don’t drop it. Don’t lose it. And what I’m really saying is . . . See you later!

❦

More than a week has passed and I’m straining hard to hear the Middle Prong. Where has that connection flown? What was the sound of that beckoning? Have I traveled too far beyond its reach, too many highway miles, too many turnings within?

Here I am surrounded by books and papers, electronics and plastics, literally surrounded: Amelia says, “Your office is a big mess, Pappy.” Surrounded and cumbered by the “should’s” and “got to’s” that no doubt fill your world as well. First phone calls of the day: a change in tomorrow’s doctor appointments for Mom and Dad; on hold and digital assistant waiting for their financial manager; negotiating the week’s schedule. If only the tinnitus I constantly live with sounded more like wind in the pines and rushing water.

But right now a female cardinal is craning to reach the suet feeder I’ve hidden in the center of the holly outside my window. In an hour, Linda and I will take our first walk together on a new little sprig of MST I helped work on this month. I am rich in these connections and many more. I grieve for those who don’t experience community. Who walk past the little purple flower sprouted through the concrete and never see it. Who feel mostly alienation and suspicion for the human beings around them, much less the non-bipedal creatures. Who cut themselves off from the voice of wind that wants to fill them and let them breathe deep. Philosophers and poets write heavy volumes about the sickness in our human spirits when we separate ourselves from the earth. What is our reply?

Perhaps this Voice is saying, “C’mon, little Man. You know some folks who need to hear me. Spin a few connections!” See you later. See you now!

❦ ❦ ❦

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry

❦ ❦ ❦

Today’s poems were offered as direction for meditation while visiting our “secret spots” during several days at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Any program at Tremont always includes space for quiet reflection while outdoors in nature, whether your secret spot is halfway up the Lumber Ridge Trail or a big smooth rock beside the Little River.

Joy Harjo (born 1951) was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, (W. W. Norton, 2019), and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wendell Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, along with many other awards and honors. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

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Connect

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Frank X Walker, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, GSMIT, GSMNP, imagery, Jeannine Jordan, Kim Hayes, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, Renee Whitmore, Sarah Small, Sophia Fortunato, Suzanne Bell on November 3, 2023| 14 Comments »

[with poems by the 2023 Tremont Poetry Cohort]

Awaken

. .

You came because the river quiets your soul,

the sassafras soothes and sweetgum settles.

Have you gotten your breath? Do you remember who you are?

Leave us, now; it’s our time to sleep. You go, awake.

Sarah Small / Alcoa, Tennessee

postcard – Mother bear & cubs

❦ ❦ ❦

The Little River is singing ‘October Blues’ and I can listen if I’ll just roll down my window. Leaving the Smokies on a Sunday morning, who would have imagined such a glut of traffic, but I can make the choice to gentle my right foot and blend with the flow. And here on the right comes another choice: I pull off at Chimneys and flush the press of schedule and itinerary from my mind.

A ten minute climb into old growth hardwood cove and road noise no longer penetrates. Every few steps another chipmunk whistles its alarm. Fecund – whoever coined that word was smelling this place. The carpet is bright green hepatica saving up to flower in just a few months, the understory is summer seedhead bounty and autumn wood asters blooming like crazy, and the overstory is way up there, crooked and knobbed, reaching and mingling and only allowing an occasional glimpse of Balsam Point.

I’ve been waiting since breakfast and now I pull out the small slip of lined paper Renée gave me, a personal parting note; she prepared one for each of us in the cohort. “Read it later,” she had said. I’m going to trust she won’t mind if I share one line: “I came to this conference with some heaviness and I’m leaving with light and a sense of belonging.” A mystery, a wonder, an inexplicable blessing that in just a few days eight strangers can so deeply connect.

❦ ❦ ❦

[untitled]

You’re not a flightless bird,

+++++ your wings held tight

against your breast;

+++++ unfurl your plumage,

Go from here with boldness,

+++++ revel in your glory.

Jeannine Jordan / Lima, Ohio

postcard – Wild Turkey

❦

Community

(the Park speaks)

Inspire, breath in, be filled with spirit –

think I’d tip you like a funnel and pour

right in? Look around this circle and take

a lesson from the Queen of Connection.

Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

postcard – entrance to GSMNP

❦ ❦ ❦

Frank fans the deck and asks us each to select one. They’re postcards, of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, face down so we can’t see what we’ve picked. “The card has picked you,” Frank suggests. “What is it telling you about why you are here and what you’ll take with you when you leave?”

This is our last exercise during our last session of this inaugural Tremont Writers’ Conference. Can it be only three days ago that Frank X Walker introduced himself to us as an artist who speaks Poet? Besides the language of linebreak and word choice, what Frank so incisively speaks is creativity, challenge, connection, community. Oh yes, we learn to critique each other’s poems through his quiet observations. Yes, we engage in color studies and sound studies and we write to prompts. But Frank is not teaching us to be writers – he is teaching us to be human. His carefully considered comments touch our gifts and expose our needs, and even more than that he weaves us seven into a whole whose true commitment is to bring out the best in each other.

After ten or fifteen minutes of writing – channeling the voice we are hearing in our card’s image – Frank stops us and presents his next to last prompt: now break that all down into four lines. We probably should have seen this coming. We really aren’t ready, though, for his final instruction. He has us each pass our card two people to the left, write our home address on the fresh card we’re holding, then pass it back right to its original owner. Each of us will write our four-line poem on our card and mail it, and in a few days we will each receive a poem from one other member of the cohort.

We won’t be driving home from this gathering to resume our scribbling in isolation. We will be watching the mailbox (and text messages) with a tingle. We are now a creative family. We are connected.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Experience

Like me, a yearling bear,

caged and carried away.

You came for the experience.

Imagine me gone. Write it.

Kim Hayes / Weaverville, North Carolina

postcard – Ursus americanus, Black Bear

❦

Somewhere, Sometime

Sunlight in this open field

Safely wander, graze

Trust the treeline

Grow. (I am growing, too.)

Suzanne Bell / Pisgah Forest, North Carolina

postcard – deer graze in Cades Cove

❦ ❦ ❦

Connecting People with Nature is the motto of Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Amen! In completing the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program at Tremont, I have felt the web of connections forged there welling up in me and changing me. One begins with the name of a thing, then comes to recognize how it makes its living and gets along with its neighbors, until at last there dawns an appreciation of the deep interdependence and kinship of all life, place, and planet. One living community.

But if ecology is the study of living communities, poetry also has its ecology. How does the poem bring together all these living bits that make it come alive? Its images, its allusions, its music? How does the poem make its world equally real to or perhaps even more real than the world speeding by outside my window?

It seems to me that the technique we learn at Tremont, the Naturalist Method, is entirely congruent with the Poetic Method – Pay Attention; Ask Questions; Make Connections; Share. All of this we try to do when we “speak Poet.” And Frank X Walker has certainly enabled every bit of this in us during our few days of communion with mountains, rivers, bears, each other. It is a language of laughter and surprise. It is a language of change and growth. It is a language of discovery, insight, and awe. We are leaving Tremont bubbling with its voice and overflowing with its joy. Poetry, and Nature, are how we connect.
.

❦ ❦ ❦

[untitled]
.
Born on the top, nestled through the sides, tumbled to the bottom.
Again and again.
Those mountains captured and created.
Then they carried.

Renée Whitmore / Vass, North Carolina
postcard – sunrise through mountains in Cades Cove

❦

Clouds in my Skin

You are here
Not to burn through the mist
To roll around in the slick slopes
Of your soft hope—this knowing, this peace

Sophia Fortunato / Bozeman, Montana
postcard – mountain ridges fading into blue mist

❦ ❦ ❦

The Poetry Cohort of the First Tremont Writers’ Conference, October 15-29, 2023, is Jeannine Jordan, Bill Griffin, Sophia Fortunato, Sarah Small, Renée Whitmore, Kim Hayes, and Suzanne Bell. Our teacher, mentor, guide, and brother is Frank X Walker from Lexington, Kentucky, speaker of poetry, professor at University of Kentucky, and former state Poet Laureate.

Other instructors at this inaugural conference are Janet McCue (Non-Fiction) and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (Fiction) and the featured speaker is Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory. Jeremy Lloyd, Tremont Manager of Field and College Programs, has been the primary organizer, assisted by Tremont staff Elizabeth Davis, Erin Cantor, Lyndsey Kessler, education director John DiDiego, and many others.

This conference was also made possible through the integral participation and partnership of Great Smoky Mountains Association and Creative Services Director Frances Figart. Thank you!

Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont

Great Smoky Mountains Association